A few days ago I met Katy Butler, author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door. Her revealing book about her elderly father’s slow death and her mother’s reaction to that – by learning to question doctors and, ultimately, choosing “less” – is a cautionary tale of too much medicine. The prose is elegant, and daughter’s point of view, graspable.

What emerges, through Butler’s voice about her parents’ ordeal, is anger. She tells of the pacemaker that was placed in her father’s heart. It kept him alive through multiple strokes and progressive debility. Her father’s protracted illness became a burden to her aging mother, who cared for her husband through thick and thin. Butler minds the costs of the procedure and doctors who, with seemingly little contemplation, inserted the device and billed for it. When her mother, in her eighties, became weak with heart valve problems, she opted not to have surgery. That was a triumph, Butler suggests – that her mother didn’t let the doctors take her heart, too.

And so she writes. There’s value in this intensely personal story. Because every day in hospitals patients receive treatments they don’t want, that they wouldn’t have selected if they had understood in advance what the consequences would or could be. Too many people, especially the elderly, die after they’ve had futile, intensive or just plainly aggressive care. Butler points to the pitfalls of a system that pays doctors to do procedures rather than to communicate.

Anger is an understandable reaction to a system that dehumanizes us (patients), that treats human bodies as containers of billable ailments and broken parts. I get that. But most of the many doctors I know go about their daily work with good intention – to heal. Plus, there’s a danger of underselling, or not choosing, care that could extend life, with good quality, for years or decades.

It’s not easy to reconcile the positions of over-treated patients and over-worked doctors. Some say the answer is in better medical education, in programs like narrative medicine, in patients’ gaining knowledge and asking more questions, or in revamping doctors’ payment incentives. I don’t see an easy solution from the doctors’ side, except for what’s obvious: practicing physicians need time to think, to contemplate the purpose of what they’re advising in each patient’s case. They should be paid for intellectual and communicative (non-PR) efforts. And they should learn, or be given enough minutes in each visit assigned, to hear, listen and respond to patients’ concerns.

The author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Katy Butler, mentioned that she’s eager to give grand rounds, to speak before doctors including cardiologists. She’d love to tell and teach them, and us, a thing or two.

It’s foggy today, October 3, ten years since the last mammogram I had and will ever need. I’ve been remiss in updating the blog. The reasons include family concerns and other projects. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the big picture – what’s most important for progress against breast cancer in the decade ahead.

So here’s what I see, now – in terms of three priority areas: improving treatment, prevention, and education to inform treatment decisions.

Pumpkins, organized by subtype (WikiCommons image)

As an oncologist, I perceive huge strides in understanding BC since the time of my diagnosis. But these advances are largely invisible to patients because they’re in the realm of pathology and classification of different subtypes. What was essentially a 3-type malignancy with a handful of treatment options has expanded under the molecular microscope to a spectrum of 4, 10 or – what’s probably most accurate – hundreds or thousands of patient-particular conditions, depending on the level of precision by which you define a disease. I’m optimistic, because it looks as though, in my lifetime, BC treatment will be tailored to each patient. There’ll be less surgery and better drugs.

The hitch, now, is not so much with science as with funding– funding to analyze each patient’s tumor at the genetic and protein levels, funding to pay for treatments selected by patients (which might include less treatment and/or palliative care in advanced cases), and funding to educate doctors about BC subtypes and medical progress, so they might offer “modern” advice to each patient in ordinary clinics, apart from clinical trials and academic centers. Newer is not always better in medical care. Same goes for more treatment (especially when it comes to higher doses). Still, the lag between advances in BC science and application of distinct, targeted and better treatments is frustrating at best.

Some of my colleagues call for patience – emphasizing that studies need be confirmed, drugs tested in mice, etc. Their point is that we can’t jump from pathology research and new BC classifications to new therapy. But one lesson I take from progress against AIDS is that maybe we shouldn’t be so patient. At least not for young people with poor-prognosis BC subtypes or stage. We could do studies and studies of particular BC treatments, and studies of studies (those would be meta-analyses) and debate 8 or 10 years from now whether a particular drug or combination of drugs worked in clinical trials that selected for patients with an antiquated subtype of the disease. Or we could move toward “n=1” trials, with smart, well-trained physicians assessing each patient by a combination of old-fashioned physical exams and the most modern of molecular studies of the tumors, considering the options, and moving forward with individual, mini-experimental treatment plans.

I vote for the latter. If the drug works in a patient with advanced BC and the patient feels better, why not?

For people with early-stage BC, prescribing or taking new and essentially untested drugs makes less sense at first glance. That’s because standard treatments are “successful” – leading to long-term remissions and possible cures in over 80 percent of those affected. But these relatively good results may have, paradoxically, hampered development of better drugs that could obviate the need for breast-deforming surgeries and radiation in many women. The possible application of BC drug cocktails, in lieu of surgery for early-stage patients, is a huge question for the future, and one for which trials would be necessary. Just getting those projects going – applying BC science to treatment of early-stage cases – would be a step in the right direction.

As for BC prevention, of course that would be infinitely better than detecting or treating the disease. Unfortunately, I think we’re farther away from preventing the disease than we are from having effective and less brutal treatments for most patients. The problem with lifestyle modification – like staying active and not obese – is that it’s far from full-proof: You can be seemingly fit as a fiddle and get a lethal case of BC. Still, there are plenty of other health-related reasons for women to exercise and eat sensibly. As for avoiding carcinogens or, first, just knowing what chemicals contribute to BC formation and growth, the science isn’t there yet. It’ll be a long haul before anyone can prove that a particular chemical causes this disease. That said, I advocate research in the slow-growing field of environmental oncology and wish there’d be more enthusiasm for regulating our exposure to likely-toxic chemicals.

The third priority is for improving education in math and science, starting at the elementary school level. Doctors need to understand statistics, but many don’t. They need to know about genomics and basic science in medicine. Patients need this kind of knowledge if they want to have a clue, if they want to engage meaningfully in decisions about which antibody to take, or pill, or whether they want to participate in a clinical trial of pills instead of surgery for a Stage II tumor with high levels of Her2, for example. That’d be a tough decision for an oncologist. I only wish that we could reach the point where we could have those kinds of truly informed conversations about clinical treatment of breast cancer, which happen every day.

We’ve got a lot of information in hand, but we need to learn how to apply that to more patients, faster and more openly.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was working as a board-certified oncologist. The initial decisions most patients face – which doctor to see, what kind of doctor to see, and at which medical center to see them – were basically non-decisions. I knew, within an instant of my diagnosis, who I’d ask to be my oncologist, surgeon and plastic surgeon. Those choices were straightforward, because I knew what those physicians were like in terms of how they cared for patients, their knowledge and other aspects of their practices and personalities.

The harder decisions were what treatment to take, or not, for my early-stage breast cancer. I was perhaps the most informed cancer patient who could walk into an oncologist’s office. I was familiar with the different regimens. I knew that adjuvant chemotherapy would, roughly and over the long haul, reduce my odds of recurrence by a third. I was aware that, if I opted for a lumpectomy, radiation treatment would reduce the local recurrence rate but was unlikely to affect my long-term survival. I understood that dose-intense regimens were more likely to make me sick and more likely to cause problems down the road.

And yes, in the back of my head I knew that chemotherapy can cause another cancer. Did I think about that possibility? The best answer is, probably, not so much. I was coping with the present.

But that knowledge did influence the decision I made to take a relatively “light” dose of chemotherapy. I was lucky, also, in that I understood my pathology. My tumor, at 1.5 cm, with a negative sentinel node and generous expression of hormone receptors, was a good-prognosis tumor. I was 42 years old, and wanted to live for a few more decades if I survived my spine surgery (another story). I chose the minimal amount of chemo that had been shown in clinical trials to reduce the odds of recurrence.

Last week, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic on how doctors and patients talk about the risks of chemotherapy, or not, and whether patients listen or necessarily want to listen. The reason I put it out there is because I’ve seen doctors shy away from this part of the conversation about cancer treatment. I’m a firm believer in informed consent, and in patients’ access to as much information as they choose to have. If you get chemotherapy, you have the right to know about these risks, and to ask your doctor about them.

I’ve been there with patients who’ve said: “please, don’t tell me this. I can’t deal with it.” Some might even consider it cruel to tell patients with a serious, urgent and treatment-needing condition details of all the possible side effects. Many ask, “what would you do, doctor, if it were someone in your family?” And if they like and respect you, they go with your recommendation.

This kind of paternalism, when a doctor assesses the risks and benefits, and spares the patient’s “knowing” seems anachronistic. But it may, still, be what many people are looking for when and if they get a serious illness. Not everyone wants a “tell me everything” kind of physician. What do you think?

This week the NIH launched a new website, NIH Clinical Research Trials and You. In a Feb 6 press release, NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins said “The ability to recruit the necessary number of volunteers is vital to carrying out clinical research.” The idea behind the website is to help patients understand how clinical research works, and what it’s like to participate.

The site offers a menu of “basics” about clinical trials, addressing topics like:

There’s an imperfect glossary of terms, a selection of patients’ and investigators’ stories, information for kids in research, and other resources including a link to the clinical trials database: ClinicalTrials.gov.

Today’s word comes from Nature News that the NIH is dropping a proposed requirement for universities to disclose researchers’ financial ties to industry on websites. This is a loss for patients, who may not be aware of their doctors’ relationships with pharmaceutical companies and others who fund clinical trials, fellowships, conference junkets and other perks for physicians.

In 2010, NIH Director Francis Collins wrote: “As the nation’s biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must ensure that the research it funds on the behalf of US taxpayers is scientifically rigorous and free of bias.”

This sounds right to me, as it did to the folks at the health and safety arm of Public Citizen, according to the Nature report:

…a cornerstone of that transparency drive — a series of publicly accessible websites detailing such financial conflicts — has now been dropped. “They have pulled the rug out from under this,” says Sidney Wolfe, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, a consumer-protection organization based in Washington DC. “It greatly diminishes the amount of vigilance that the public can exercise over financially conflicted research being funded by the NIH.”

As explained in the article, the proposal came about after evidence came to light that prominent NIH grant recipients had failed to inform their employers (universities and medical schools) about lucrative payments from companies that may have influenced their research. The problem now comes, in part, from lack of funding: the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has no way to enforce the requirement.

That’s no surprise. But it turns out that academic groups lobbied against the requirement. According to the Nature News piece, the Association of American Universities and the Association of American Medical Colleges submitted a joint statement objecting that a website detailing physicians’ potential conflicts of interest (COI) would be onerous:

“There are serious and reasonable concerns among our members that the Web posting will be of little practical value to the public and, without context for the information, could lead to confusion rather than clarity regarding financial conflicts of interest and how they are managed.”

As a patient and as a physician who’s cared for patients in clinical trials and served on an institutional review board (IRB), I can’t be more clear in my thinking that the public should know about academic (and all) physicians’ ties with industry. Every institution with NIH funding should make this kind of information readily available and clear to patients. Otherwise, the faculty don’t deserve the NIH support they’re receiving for the research, nor do they deserve the public’s trust in their work.

Patients should be able to find this kind of information readily, before they enroll in clinical trials or decide to undergo any elective procedures, and even before they choose the physician who would guide them in health care decisions.

The latest NEJM features a bigstory about a small trial, with only 39 patients in the end, on the potential for placebos to relieve patients’ experience of symptoms. This follows other recent reports on the subjective effectiveness of pseudo-pharmacology.

My point for today is that placebos are problematic in health care with few exceptions. First, in clinical trials, patients sometimes agree to take what might be a placebo so that researchers can measure effects of a drug, by comparison. A second instance is, possibly, when doctors treat children. Even then, I’m not sure it’s wise to “train” kids to take a pill and expect to feel better.

The relationship of an adult patient with a physician involves, or should involve, trust and mutual respect. A person cannot possibly give informed consent for a treatment he or she doesn’t know about. So if the doctor’s giving a placebo to the patient, and making the decision for the patient because it might help, that diminishes the patient’s autonomy, or self-determination. In simpler terms, it’s condescending.

You might consider the hypothesis that there’s nothing wrong with something if it makes you, or someone else, feel better. But that’s kind of like saying the ends justify the means.

A placebo is, by definition, manipulative. I wouldn’t want any doctor to treat me that way.

This is the second in a series of posts on Bending the Cost Curve in Cancer Care. We should consider the proposal, published in the NEJM, gradually over the course of this summer, starting with “suggested changes in oncologists’ behavior,” #1:

The NEJM authors consider that after a cancer diagnosis many patients, understandably, seek reassurance that any recurrence will be detected early, if it happens. Doctors, for their part, may not fully appreciate the lack of benefit of detecting a liver met when it’s 2 cm rather than, say, just 1 cm in size. What’s more, physicians may have a conflict of interest, if they earn ancillary income by ordering lab and imaging tests.

My take:

It’s clear that some and possibly most cancer patients get too many and too frequent post-treatment surveillance tests. Believe it or not, yours truly, whose life was saved by a screening digital mammogram, maintains a healthy fear of excess radiation exposure. I agree to x-rays, CT scans, myelograms and whatever else my doctors suggest only when I’m reasonably confident that the test result would influence a treatment decision.

My impression is that, in general, oncologists’ habits of ordering routine, interval-based imaging for patients in remission after cancer treatment (such as a scan every 3 or 4 or 6 or 12 months) are arbitrary and unsupportable by any published data. These sorts of practices, which vary among communities, arise like this: A senior, smart and well-intentioned oncologist at a major teaching hospital, circa 1990, orders newfangled CT scans of the chest, abdomen and pelvis on his lymphoma patients every 4 months for two years, and then every 6 months for two years, and then every 12 months, for no reason other that he thinks it’s a good idea. The patients like it; they’re reassured, and he (the oncologist) feels good about having prescribed the drugs that caused their sustained remission.

Talk about a positive feedback loop! (We needn’t even invoke financial incentives as a motivating force.) And then that’s just how it’s done by all the fellows he’s taught over the years, who then branch out into other communities and even other countries, and teach…

Why not?

Now things may be changing a bit, as patients like me are starting to fear radiation exposure, and also are starting to question doctors’ recommendations more than they did even a few years ago. Younger doctors, too, have more requirements to continue their medical education in order to keep practicing at most hospitals and maintain their board certificates, and so they, too, may be more questioning of these archaic practices.

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About post-treatment screening with scheduled blood work, I see this issue somewhat differently than do the NEJM authors, mainly in that I’m optimistic about simple blood tests, in the future, that may provide affordable and clinically relevant information to patients who’ve undergone treatment with tumors at high risk of recurrence.

As the authors point out, there are some old tests, such as CEA screening, that can be helpful in monitoring for recurrence in patients with a history of colon cancer. In general, blood tests are less dangerous and less expensive than imaging studies. Besides, in patients with aggressive tumors that might respond to new targeted drugs, tests that measure circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in small blood samples, and could assess cells for new mutations, at low costs in the future (not now), might render some blood tests useful and even cost-effective, in the future.

Finally, I’d like to throw in a concern I have about some clinical trials, in case any study designers or persuasive cancer IRB members happen to be reading this post:

Some of the clinical trials for new cancer drugs may require too many follow-up MRIs, CTs and other scans. Even if Pfizer or any other company foots the bill, by participating in the trials patients shouldn’t be subjected to excessive radiation or even just the unpleasantness and hassle of a said-to-be-safe test like an MRI. This pet peeve is especially concerning in some trials requiring multiple post-treatment PET scans, the most rad-intense of common imaging methods.

If you’re thinking of participating in a clinical trial for cancer or any other medical condition, a good place to find out about the research is ClinicalTrials.gov.

The site, sponsored by the NIH, NLM and FDA, is one outcome of the FDA Modernization Act (FDAMA) of 1997. The database aims to provide information on clinical trials to patients and physicians, and to generally increase transparency on study funding, design and availability of other trials evaluating the same condition or drug.

A mouthful of jargon, as you’ll find regarding pretty much any trial. But better that it’s public –

In recent years, some medical journals have required that clinical investigators seeking to publish study results register their trials, from the start, with the Clinical Trials database. Since 2007, when Congress passed the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of that year (US Public Law 110-85) researchers must register and report results for most clinical trials of drugs, biologics, and devices.

Last week, Pauline Chen wrote on medical ethics and clinical trials. She reflects on her training at a cancer research hospital, where some cancer patients go with unrealistic optimism.

Like Dr. Chen, I spent part of my training at a famous cancer center where I worked as a resident and fellow on rotations. And yes, some patients were unreasonably optimistic and some – perhaps even most, it seemed – didn’t fully “get” the purpose of their trial, which in Phase I studies were not designed to help them. This is a real dilemma for treating oncologists.

The problem of patients’ false expectations might arise from a Lake Wobegon effect, suggests Dr. Daniel Sulmasy in the Times piece: “If you have more than 50 percent of patients saying their chances are better than average of avoiding some harm or obtaining some benefit, they are being unrealistically optimistic because you can’t say that most people are above average.”

I share Chen’s concern about ethics in clinical trials. Besides that patients don’t always (read: often) don’t understand the study, and that they may be coerced – usually subtly – into signing on, and that they may, ultimately, be simply used as objects in a researcher’s career-advancing investigation, clinical research sometimes does help humans, and progress occasionally happens in medicine. Take the woman with metastatic melanoma she recalls in the story: There might be effective drugs for her condition now, or next year.

The flip side of the Wobegon effect in medical ethics of clinical trials is that some patients (and their doctors) might have undue pessimism. These are the “50 percent” of patients who won’t show up at research centers, which could, potentially, help them to get well or at least feel better.

I think one of the biggest challenges for patients with serious conditions and their doctors is discerning what’s worth trying, and what’s snake oil in an academic outfit. Hard to know before the trial’s done –
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When talking to patients about a rare type of cancer linked to breast implants, plastic surgeons should call it “a condition” and avoid using the words cancer, tumor, disease or malignancy, the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons advised members during an online seminar on Feb. 3.

This is how doctors spoke to patients 50 and 100 years ago, and in some cultures still do, by not mentioning scary words – especially to women, and not calling a cancer what it is.

Cosmetic verbage?

Most cancers aren’t lethal* is one message for 2011: the “big C” turns out to be a spectrum of hundreds of diseases, each with distinct subtypes, and patients shouldn’t panic when they hear the word. Some are benign in behavior although technically malignant; others behave live chronic illnesses; some, unfortunately, grow fast and can kill.

Oncologists can have a hard time persuading patients that a slow-growing tumor doesn’t need much treatment. It would help if other doctors don’t shy away from the term – keeping it taboo and, ultimately, promoting fear.